Strength of Arms

A pump spell that hides a tempo swing behind a conditional clause. The base mode is a vanilla one-mana combat trick, the kind of effect white has printed since the earliest sets, but the rider rewards a board state most decks never bother to assemble: control an Equipment, and the same spell that wins a combat step also leaves a body behind. That second half changes the math entirely. A typical trick trades even, and worse, evaporates for nothing if your opponent declines the block; here, even an unanswered cast adds a 1/1 Human Soldier to the board, turning a card that would otherwise vanish into permanent pressure. The design lives or dies on whether you've already paid the deckbuilding tax of running Equipment, which is the constraint that justifies stapling token generation to a cheap instant. The payoff arrives only where the artifact plan was in place before this card was ever drawn. The token, notably, doesn't care whether the Equipment is attached to anything: just owning a Bonesplitter or a Leather Armor on the battlefield is enough. That makes it less a combat trick that happens to make a token and more a token-maker that happens to pump, depending on how hard a build leans into the artifact theme.